COUNTRY: BRAZIL
CITY: Guarapuava, PR
YEAR: 1981 - 2011

The gypsy woman stares out at me with her perturbing gaze. Inquisitive. As though her unkempt hair, her shirt of asymmetric wildflowers and her pose of apparent control were not enough, what grabs our attention is the straight-on frontal view of the image’s framing.This confrontation enhances the tension in the image, underscoring the impossibility of its immediate deciphering by any means. In an interview, Iberê Camargo remind us that, “Reality is an enigma that time does not banalize and man does not decode. It is the Sphinx that devours us.”…It is through this perspective that I see Valdir Cruz’s long photographic essay on Guarapuava, the city and county where he was born and grew up. For approximately thirty years, his regular visits to this place were transformed into photographs, visual fragments that we now see selected in this ambitious project.

Rubens Fernandes Junior